Packshotnik: 360 degree image creation

Packshotnik is a circuit designed to help with creating 360 degree images. It consists of a main board and motorized rotating platform. The board can send IR signals to a camera to snap pictures at intervals in the rotation. The source code, schematic, and pcb files are all available from the project page. While he is using this primarily for rotating 360 degree images, you could also just plop your camera onto the platform and end up with panoramic sets.

This is wonderful. I used to make 3D models of real life things using a webcam, laser level, and Blender. But it took 30 minutes to get things set up right, imported, then fine tuned. This would be a great automated alternative for making such models.

@BiOzZ
Yeah, my canon’s are all 5fps and above, the issue is timing/lighting.
If you have studio lighting set up and can reproduce the same light every half second, then I’m sure it would work faster, but you cant get down to 1/4 sec until your shutter speed is way up, if you want sharp photos.

This is an awesome project, if I did it, my end product video would be much slower, the examples kind of make me dizzy.

I have a display like that, but much smaller and green.
Easy to use you just set the bits for the character and two bits for which display, fire the strobe and bam. Multiplexing taken care of.
When power is applied you can get random characters probably from uninitialized RAM

I built one of these too a few years ago with a Lego Mindstorms kit – one of the first things I built with it. I had a turntable controlled by one lego motor and a flicker attached to another motor that would snap down and press the shutter button my little digital compact camera. Rotate, snap, rotate, snap. It did the job great!

Maybe a dumb question – but isn’t that absolutely useless?! Why not use a simple rotating plattform with a video-camera instead? Is he doing this just for the sake of resolution?! I mean – there are a lots of cheap hi-res (hd) video cameras available…

@tobot: not a much better quality, but at least hd quality. The question is: who needs videos with a better quality than hd?! Images with a resolution > hd – okay, but videos? Which device plays that without downscaling?!

I did this out of curiosity, not much else. I don’t have a HD camera, too. But even if you have one, you still need a rotary platform that can spin at a very regular pace. In that case, control loop will have to be adjusted to deliver constant angular velocity instead of just regular angles.

For the home user I can’t see much need for it, but that doesn’t seem like a reason NOT to do it! I’d personally hate to hear all my shutter actuations fluttering away for the sake of a rotating view of common household objects. Maybe for some super-macro views around something interesting though…

Pausing, video, even HD, leaves something to be desired. This technique gives a person a 360 view of an object they can view at a speed they choose, with the best paused image quality possible. I’d think the more frames the better, slower would be better than faster. Something online vendors could make great use of. I can screw up a point and shoot snapshot, so pay me no mind…